Kevin Frisch: Photography is not without its negatives

Thursday

Jun 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMJun 26, 2008 at 3:30 AM

Photographers can have it rough sometimes. Their job requires them to put themselves in close proximity to the action. A photographer who is too shy or self-conscious to stand up in front of a crowd isn’t going to get many good shots.

Kevin Frisch

I felt bad for our photographer Vasiliy Baziuk a few weeks ago.

He was assigned to cover a concert by Canandaigua (N.Y.) Academy students who paid musical tribute to the military.

Photographers can have it rough sometimes. Their job requires them to put themselves in close proximity to the action. A photographer who is too shy or self-conscious to stand up in front of a crowd — in this case, a crowd of thousands at the Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center — isn’t going to get many good shots.

I doubt if anyone ever used the word “shy” to describe Vasiliy, however, and he combined his trademark enthusiasm and creative composition skills to capture some compelling shots. In fact, we devoted about two-thirds of the front page to the photos and a story that ran with them.

For all his good work, Vasiliy was publicly upbraided.

A school board member wrote the paper to complain that his efforts were intrusive. He stood too close to a student soloist, she said, and the flash on his camera was distracting. “It was rude and disrespectful beyond description,” she wrote.

Vasiliy, I feel your pain.

I, too, was made aware in no uncertain terms that my presence as a photographer at the local concert venue was less than welcome.

The event was a jazz festival at the veritable shell, probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s but definitely before Sept. 28, 1991, since that’s the day one of the performers — Miles Davis — died.

But Miles was in fine form on this sultry summer day. And as it turned out, his was one of the few acts we were allowed to photograph from the edge of the stage. The handlers for both Ray Charles and Diane Schuur insisted we shoot their performances from about 30 rows back, near the mixing board, so there wouldn’t be any distractions.

How we would have distracted the pianists, both of whom were blind, was not explained.

But that’s all part of covering an artist. You have to operate within the confines of their boundaries. For instance, when photographer Spencer Tunick convinces hundreds of people to disrobe and pose for his camera (how he does this, I have no idea; I have enough trouble convincing even one person to disrobe), he insists journalists refer to the event as an “installation,” as opposed to say, a mass nude-in.

Most artists are a little more reasonable. (Most. Pop vocalist Tori Amos invited reporters to cover her sound check when she played at the shell a few years ago, then had security tell the arriving journalists not to look at her.)

No such unusual requests on the day of the jazz fest. Just the usual three-songs-and-out rule. Most musicians allow the press to shoot photos for the first three songs (sometimes just the first song; sometimes the first two). For Miles Davis, it was three.

I and a few other photographers clicked away as the performance started. Davis’ habit of turning his back on the audience didn’t make our job any easier. As the third song started, I angled my lens toward the stage with a little more success. The other photographers had given up and I suddenly had more room to work. I was just getting Miles in focus and prepared to capture an image I was certain would be worthy of the cover of Downbeat when I was advised I had overstayed my welcome. And by “advised” I mean grabbed by the back of the collar and hauled out of the shell.

I had been misadvised on the two-songs-and-out rule.

Mercifully, the music was plenty loud enough to mask whatever laughter was generated by my enforced departure.

Sometimes you get criticized in print; sometimes you get tossed out on your ear. It’s all part of being a photojournalist and it is, in large part, why I switched my specialty to columnist.